Everybody Says I'm Fine!

I saw this film, the director's first attempt, when it debuted at the Philly Film Festival in 2002. I found it to be VERY disappointing. Without giving too much away, the director takes a clichéd Bollywoodian approach to very strong themes of sexual abuse, revenge and violence.

In the Q& A period following the film, the director admitted that some of the events were based on his true experiences, he explained as well that he had wanted to avenge a close friend through the story he portrayed. It is quite clear that he was much too emotionally close to resolving his own demons when he made this film. As a result, the film is extremely naive. Being passionate about cinema and world cinema in particular, I walked away incredibly frustrated.

I was more than surprised to see Rahul Bose create an artistically moving and very indigenous piece of cinema in his clever directorial debut Everybody Says I'm Fine! that I was completely hooked to the screen the entire 100 minutes even as lead actor Rehan Engineer puts up a wooden face whenever he is supposed to act. For a film released in 2001, watching it in 2018 feels like a run down the memory lane, especially if you have been in Mumbai, as director Bose checks all the boxes in his product - Apple computers, upscale salon, trendy socialites, typical socialite talk with that vanity, young romance - and I sat there looking at them like a kid drooling at an ice-cream van's menu. Engineer plays a beauty salon owner who is also the head stylist/barber in the heart of the city and which is frequented by the socialites of the upper class Mumbai. Under his clean-shaven look and balding mane is the absurd power of hearing another person's thoughts whenever he cuts their hair, giving him a wholly different picture of the person than what they have concocted for the outside world. I don't think I have ever seen that concept out in the wild and it is absolutely fascinating to be a spectator with Xen, the character, as opens his shop, listens to a dozen inner thoughts, and goes back to sleep. Everybody Says I'm Fine! is made linearly and has bold scenes at every juncture, which I think must have contributed to how it was received close to two decades earlier. It even has Bose in a starring role (an eccentric), Boman Irani at his fine air of a businessman, and Pooja Bhatt - all of whom are so fun to watch regardless of their characters. I was blown away by the entire parade of proceedings that Everybody Says I'm Fine! churns out with so much substance and energy that I was a bit disappointed by how it ends. Looked like Bose was unable to bid adieu to his creative flow as the comedy drama ends like a bag full of water and one tiny leaking hole. Everyone interested in Bollywood should check it out though. TN.

I hate the inaneness of the run of the mill Bollywood formula flick in general, so I decided to give this film the benefit of the doubt, especially since the writer/director Bose has a few good oeuvres under his belt, albeit as an actor ("English August", a laugh out loud portrayal of a young civil servant's career in rural India, and "Mr and Mrs Iyer", a serious look at the communal divide between Hindus and Muslims woven into a warm and vibrant cross-country bus trip), this film being his foray behind the camera.

The plot revolves around Xen, a young hairdresser who has the bizarre ability to read people's minds while he is cutting their hair. This leads to a series of revelations most of them loosely connected with the story, although some scenes go off on tangents and you're left wondering why they are there.

The film fails on many levels. Real people do not act this way. Yes, the uppermost strata of Indian society are known for their mercedes-driving, club-going, gossipy and fake lifestyles, but several characters in the story are hopelessly overdone. Rahul Boses, Rage, character could have been less melodramatic and less wordy. So could Koel Purie's Nikita. This kind of acting fits nicely into a three-act play, playing these characters on film however is a completely different ball game altogether.

The script tries to be something it is not - intelligent. In a couple of scenes involving Rage and Nikita's interactions with Xen the hairdresser, the scriptwriter sounds like he wants to get as many words into one sentence as he can, leaving the actor gasping for breath after the delivery. Why the verbosity ? There is a benefit to keeping it simple - it won't not look fake!

And finally, does the writer really want us to empathize with a murderer ? And live happily ever after ?

Keep it real, Rahul, keep it real.

An excellent film...funny, charming, wry, yet also gritty and compelling. Nikita (Koel Purie) has a cathartic scene reminiscent of Liv Ullman in Bergman's "Face to Face." She submerges herself in a fugue state unflinchingly. The climactic turn of events lift the film to a more profound conclusion than the first half augured.

About a barber who can hear the flow of thinking of the person to whom he is giving a haircut. He helps them(his customers) courteously but somehow directly by the information unknowingly given by themselves. He meets a girl and gets intimate with her, only to find that she has been abused by her successful father whom himself is also the barber's customer.